By the Mayab Media Team
Your next customer might not be a person. It might be a piece of software doing the shopping for a person. And a U.S. appeals court just said that's mostly fine.
Most businesses will treat this as a tech-giant fight that has nothing to do with them. That's a mistake.
What the court decided
Quick background. Perplexity's Comet browser has an AI agent that can go to Amazon, find a product and complete a purchase for the user. Amazon didn't like that. It sent a cease-and-desist in November 2025, sued in March 2026, and got a preliminary injunction that blocked Comet from shopping on Amazon.
On August 4, 2026, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that injunction, as Engadget reported. The court's reasoning was simple. Comet only goes to Amazon when a user tells it to. So the user is the one accessing Amazon, not Perplexity. That knocked out Amazon's main claim under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the U.S. anti-hacking law.
Amazon's side, according to The Next Web: Comet disguised itself as a normal Chrome browser, and Perplexity had agreed in 2024 to pause agentic shopping. Amazon said it respectfully disagrees and is weighing next steps, which could include a rehearing or a Supreme Court petition. The main lawsuit keeps going in federal court in San Francisco.
So this isn't the final word. But it's the clearest signal yet from a U.S. court on whether an AI agent acting for a shopper counts as hacking. For now, the answer is no.
Why this matters even if you're not Amazon
Here's the part most people miss. If Amazon, with all its lawyers, couldn't keep a shopping agent off its store, your online shop probably won't either. And honestly, you probably shouldn't want to.
Think about what an agent does. It doesn't see your hero banner. It doesn't care about your homepage video. It reads product data. Price. Size. Stock. Shipping time. Return policy. Then it compares you to everyone else and picks.
The Next Web points out another angle. Agents can skip Amazon's search rankings, recommendations and sponsored spots. That's a threat to Amazon's ad business. It's also an opening for smaller stores. If agents compare products on facts instead of ad spend, a well-structured small store can beat a bigger brand that buries its info.
The flip side: if your site is confusing for a robot, you're invisible to every customer who sends one.
Make your store agent-friendly: a 5-step check
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Try it yourself. Use an AI browser or agent and ask it to buy one of your products. Watch where it gets stuck. A popup it can't close? A size chart in an image? A checkout that needs an account? Every snag you see is a sale you'd lose.
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Put the facts in text, not images. Price, dimensions, materials, compatibility, shipping times and return windows should be plain text on the product page. Agents can't reliably read a spec sheet baked into a JPEG.
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Add Product structured data. Use schema.org Product and Offer markup with price, availability, currency, shipping details and return policy. This is how machines read your page without guessing. Check it with Google's Rich Results Test.
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Allow guest checkout. Forced account creation is friction for humans. For an agent, it's often a dead end. If you must collect accounts, offer it after the purchase.
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Check your bot settings. Many sites block anything that isn't a "normal" browser through their firewall or CDN. That might block legitimate shopping agents too. Review your bot rules on purpose: block abuse, but don't block the customers who show up through software.
If you only have an hour this week, do step 1. Watching an agent fail on your own checkout is the fastest way to get the rest of your team to care.
Our take
We think this ruling speeds up something that was already coming. AI agents that compare and buy on someone's behalf aren't a 2030 idea. They're live, and now they have a court ruling on their side.
We'd also say: don't overreact. Agent shopping is still a small share of sales for most stores, and the case isn't over. But the work to get ready (clear product data, simple checkout, sane bot rules) also helps your human shoppers and your Google rankings. There's no wasted effort here.
The takeaway: if an AI agent can't easily read and buy from your store, a growing slice of shoppers won't either.
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